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The death of former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led one anti-Thatcher site to ask its fans to tweet about the ways they'd celebrate, using the hashtag #nowthatchersdead. Only one problem: Some Twitter users read the tag not as "Now Thatcher's Dead" but rather as "Now That Cher's Dead." The resultant outburst of mourning for the singer led comedian Ricky Gervais to intervene with a tweet telling Cher's fans that their idol was still alive and kicking.

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Esurance's post-Super Bowl announcement that it planned to give away $1.5 million resulted in more than 200,000 people using the hashtag #EsuranceSave30 to join the contest within the first minute. According to Esurance agency Leo Burnett, the brand got 2.6 billion impressions on Twitter, the contest hashtag was used in 5.4 million tweets, and Esurance's Twitter account added 261,000 followers. A California man was awarded the money on Wednesday's "Jimmy Kimmel Live."

Twitter saw plenty of remarkably convincing hoaxes during 2013, many of them in remarkably bad taste. One hoax attempted to trick Justin Bieber's fans into injuring themselves; another led many to believe that Cher, not Margaret Thatcher, had passed away; and perhaps most shocking of all, the @Horse_ebooks account was revealed to be performance art.

Dunkin' Donuts has started running TV ads featuring its Twitter fans and the hashtag #MyDunkin, building on the success of its Vine TV commercial and its social focus on customer testimonials. "We're finding there's real synergy among social media, mobile and traditional marketing. While each one works independently, the real power is integrating all of those things," Chief Marketing Officer John Costello said.

Tweets that contain hashtags are about 55% more likely to be retweeted than messages that don't contain tags, according to research by Dan Zarrella. Including quotes in tweets also helps to win retweets, although the effect was somewhat smaller, Zarrella writes.

Chief marketing officers are the C-suite executives most likely to use social media regularly, and that makes them more powerful members of many companies' executive tier, research suggests. About 90% of CMOs say they use social data to guide their decision making, and some executives say these social efforts are the reason why the average CMO holds on to their job much longer. "The signs are everywhere that the CMO's position is increasing in importance," Lattice Engines CMO Brian Kardon says.